Great works of art often become so present in our everyday lives - the "Mona Lisa" on a mug, "The Starry Night" on a sweater, Basquiat in Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Tiffany campaign - that it's easy to forget how fragile the originals are. These images that populate our collective consciousness all started as a single destructible canvas. But most museums don't highlight the life these artworks have had as physical objects - often because that history is wrapped up in colonialism and theft.

At the new Jewish Museum exhibition "Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art," which opened l...